The cars Britain regrets selling: notes from the inbox

Running a service that asks people what car they wish they hadn't sold turns out to be a strange way to spend two years.

Previous Keeper is, on paper, a notification system. You add a registration of a car you used to own, we monitor the major UK marketplaces, we email you when it reappears. On paper.

In practice, what we are is a thing people use to make peace with cars they shouldn't have parted with. The notes people write in the optional "anything else?" box on the signup form would, if collected and printed, make a more honest history of the British car-buyer than any sales chart.

This is a snapshot of what's in there. We've not run a survey. We've not interviewed anyone. The data below is the cars people have voluntarily typed into the tracking list, scrubbed of anything personal, looked at sideways. It is the most-regretted-cars list as written by the people doing the regretting, not the auction houses or the magazines.

The unsurprising ones

Some cars come up so often they've become an in-joke at this end. If you've ever owned one of these and sold it, statistically, you are not alone in thinking about it on the M6 once a quarter.

Mazda MX-5 NA (1990–1997). First-generation Eunos in particular. Almost every NA on the road has been sold to someone who wishes they hadn't sold theirs first. They cost no money to run, they do not let you down, and selling one is something people do for sensible reasons that they never quite forgive themselves for. The MX-5 community is unusual in that quite a lot of people on it know the registration of their first car by heart.

Lotus Elise S1 and S2. S1 in particular. People sold them because they couldn't fit a child in one. The child grew up, the original car stayed in their head. The buyback rate when an Elise is reunited with an original keeper is the highest of any model we've seen. They tend to come back when the seller's children are old enough to be impressed and not old enough to refuse a passenger ride.

E30 BMW M3 / E30 318iS / E36 M3. Especially anything sold pre-2008, when the values doubled and didn't come back. The "I sold it for nine grand and it just made fifty-five at auction" story is its own genre. We have several. They never get less painful to read.

Mk1 Ford Focus RS, Escort RS Cosworth, Sierra RS500. The Cosworths are now investment-grade and the people who sold them in 1998 for the cost of a kitchen are still telling the story today. We have three users tracking the same Sierra RS500.

Subaru Impreza Turbo, Mitsubishi Evo (any), Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R. Nineties JDM has had a generational reappraisal, the prices have followed, and the people who sold theirs to fund a Mondeo company-car upgrade have not quite let go. Skyline R32s in particular generate the most "I sold it in 2004 to a man called [redacted], if anyone knows him please tell him hello" notes in the box.

Honda S2000. Specifically the early AP1 in Berlina Black. The "I just wanted something more practical" line is so consistent across S2000 listings that it deserves its own data point.

The surprising ones

These are the cars that come up much more often than the magazines would have you guess.

Vauxhall Carlton 3000 GSi 24v and Carlton Lotus. A genuine niche cult, and not just the Lotus, the standard 3000 GSi has its devotees too. We have one user who has tracked his since 1996.

Peugeot 205 GTi 1.9. Predictable. But the 309 GTi has nearly as many entries, and almost nobody talks about the 309 GTi outside of the people who owned one.

Renault Avantime. Yes, really. Eighteen entries on a car only about 8,500 of which were ever built. The conversion rate from "sold one" to "now actively monitoring it for resale" is over 1%, which is a wildly disproportionate number for a car generally remembered as a sales disaster.

Volvo 850 R, T5R and 940 GLE estates. The estates more than the saloons. Specifically the 940s with the rectangular headlights and the manual dials. Volvo's used-cult is the quietest of all the marque-cults, but it's there.

Saab 9-3 Aero and 900 Turbo. Saab owners are a reliable source of "I should never have let it go" letters. The closure of the brand has given the cars a finite quality that the running fleet doesn't quite have for any other manufacturer.

Skoda Octavia vRS Mk1 (the 1.8T). Not the Mk2, not the Mk3. The original. People who owned one in their twenties are tracking them in their forties. Several users have managed to find theirs and reported back that the car had passed through six owners since they'd had it.

Citroën C6. Twelve entries. They sold a few hundred in the UK. We are tracking, statistically, more C6s than DVLA can probably account for.

The inexplicable ones

A handful of cars come up at frequencies that suggest something we don't fully understand.

Mk1 Ford Galaxy and SEAT Alhambra. Old MPVs are the surprise category. Probably nostalgia for family holidays, kids small enough to fit in the bench seats, the cassette adapter that sat in the glovebox for fifteen years.

Vauxhall Cavalier SRi. Not the GSi, not the Turbo. The plain SRi. Forty-something entries. We can only assume this generation are tracking the cars their dads had when they were children.

Rover 75 V8 (the Mustang-engined one). A weird, brilliant, doomed car. A surprising number of people are tracking them. None have ever come back up for sale on the marketplaces we monitor, which is in itself the data point. The people who own them now are not letting go.

Ford Probe (the V6). Eight entries for a car most people don't know existed.

Mk1 Toyota MR2 supercharged. This makes more sense than some on the list, but the rate is still high.

The pattern under the pattern

The most-tracked cars are not the most expensive cars. They are not the rarest cars. They are the cars that meant something to people at a particular point in their life.

The MX-5 dominates because everybody who owned one was, briefly, a person who could fit a soft-top into their life. The Avantime makes the list because almost nobody else liked them, which made owning one feel like something. The C6 makes the list because the people who liked them really liked them. The Volvo estates make the list because they were the family car when the family was getting going.

What none of the most-tracked cars have is "I bought it for status". The Porsches, BMWs, and Mercedes do show up, but disproportionately the ones bought as a private indulgence rather than a company-car perk. People who get cars they don't really care about, even nice ones, sell them and don't track them. People who get cars they cared about for personal reasons track them years after they've sold them, regardless of what those cars cost.

That's the actual finding, if there is one. Regret is correlated with affection, not value.

What we do with this

Once a year, around the same time the auction houses and the price guides publish their lists of which cars are going up in value, we plan to publish the proper version of this: the full report, anonymised, with year-on-year movement, regional breakdowns, the works.

Until then, this article is the early read. Loosely sourced, partially scrubbed, almost certainly slightly wrong somewhere. But honest, in the sense that everything in it came from people typing the answer into a box rather than us asking them to confirm what we already thought.

If you've sold a car you wish you hadn't, you're not unusual. You're in extraordinarily good company. The list of cars Britain misses is longer than the list of cars Britain currently owns, and it will go on getting longer for as long as people keep buying things they don't quite need and selling things they didn't quite want to.

The closest thing we have to a useful piece of advice, after watching this list grow for two years, is this: nobody regrets keeping a car they could afford. They regret selling cars they could have afforded to keep. The cars on this list are almost universally cars that wouldn't have ruined their owners financially. They were sold for reasons that, in retrospect, were less compelling than the owners thought at the time.

That's the boring lesson. Keep the car if you can. If you can't, write the registration down somewhere safe.

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This article will be updated when the full annual data report is published. To be notified, or to add a registration to your own list of cars you used to own, see Previous Keeper.

If you're a journalist looking for the full dataset, photographs, or interviews with users tracking specific cars, contact press@previouskeeper.com.